Mykhailo Omelianovych-Pavlenko

Mykhailo Omelianovych-Pavlenko (8 December 1878-29 May 1952) was the Supreme Commander of the Ukrainian Galician Army and Minister of Defense of the Ukrainian National Republic from 1945 to 1948. He fought in the Russo-Japanese War, World War I, the Russian Civil War, and the Polish-Ukrainian War.

Biography
Mykhailo Omelianovych-Pavlenko was born on 8 December 1878 in Tbilisi, Russian Empire (present-day Georgia) to a Georgian aristocratic family. He became a soldier in 1900 and fought in the Russo-Japanese War in 1905, and during World War I he commanded many units. In 1917 he was the founder of the Odessa Battalion of the Ukrainian National Republic, becoming an advocate of Ukrainian independence. He also founded military academies at Zhytomyr and Kamyanets-Podilsky (Kamenets-Podolsky). On 10 December 1918 he took command of the Ukrainian Galician Army and served as an attache to Szymon Petlyura, the Ukrainian leader. Omelianovych-Pavlenko served in combat against the Red Army of the Soviet Union during the Russian Civil War and against Poland in the Polish-Ukrainian War in the 1920s, and after the occupation of Ukraine by the Soviets in 1921, he moved to Prague in Czechoslovakia. He was made Minister of Defense of the Ukrainian government-in-exile and died in Paris in 1952 at the age of 73.